Srushti Sachin Pagariya

Hi, I am Srushti, a multidisciplinary designer interested in the gap between how systems are designed and how people actually experience them. I’ve worked in advertising strategy and communication, where I learned how ideas shape attention, choices, and everyday behaviour.
I now bring that understanding into design: using research, storytelling, and participatory making to uncover overlooked frictions and turn them into clearer, more inclusive experiences.
My work moves across services, culture, learning, and emerging technology, always beginning with a simple question: who is this really working for, and what could make it work better?

“The most useful design begins by noticing what others have learned to live with.”

Bored Directors is a physical instructional card system designed for 14-16 year olds in Scottish secondary schools. It responds to a simple but unresolved problem: schools are increasingly restricting phones, yet very little has been designed for the unstructured time that remains when a phone is put away.

Through research with teachers, psychologists, technologists and creative-learning practitioners, I found that phone restriction can create an unfamiliar gap. Some young people read, draw, play chess, make things or talk when given genuine space. Others experience the same time as awkward, empty or difficult to enter. The issue is not that phones are always harmful, or that boredom automatically creates creativity. It is that the transition into phone-free time is rarely designed.

The deck offers open invitations across six departments: Observation, Misdirection, Communication, Making, Stillness and De-Brief. Each card asks participants to notice, imagine, make, speak, pause or solve an incomplete fictional brief. There are no correct answers, scores or required outcomes. A card can be picked up, adapted, ignored or passed on.

Bored Directors is also a service model. Cards sit in a shared school space, with minimal adult direction and a brief human check-in: “What came up for you?” The project does not replace phones with another compulsory activity. It creates a voluntary entry point into attention, imagination, conversation and self-directed thought.

The Bored Directors